Q. & A.: Sean Wilentz on Bob Dylan

The historian Sean Wilentz, the author of “The Rise of American Democracy” and “The Age of Reagan,” has a long-standing interest in the songs of Bob Dylan, going back to his childhood in Greenwich Village. His father and uncle ran the 8th Street Bookshop, an important gathering place for the Beats and other downtown literary spirits; it was in his uncle’s apartment, above the store, that Dylan first met Allen Ginsberg. Wilentz has synthesized his memories, musical impressions, and historical analysis in a striking new book entitled “Bob Dylan in America,” which Doubleday will publish next month; newyorker.com runs an excerpt this week. As a sometime Dylan obsessive—in 1999 I wrote a long piece about Dylan, which will reappear in my forthcoming book “Listen to This”—I approached Wilentz with some questions about his latest work.

ALEX ROSS: I was fascinated by your decision to begin your book with a chapter on Aaron Copland. What led you to start there?

SEAN WILENTZ: I wanted to explore Dylan’s roots in the musical world of the Popular Front, but didn’t want to retell the stories about Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. I’d written an essay on Copland for a wholly different occasion, and started coming to grips with Copland’s Popular Front affiliations, which had helped spur his elevation of American folk music. I had a hunch that, somewhere, there must be links between Copland and Dylan.

For a while after 9/11, I recalled, Dylan opened many of his shows by playing recorded bits of Copland’s music. Then I ran across an enthusiastic review in the Daily Worker of Copland’s early work, written by Charles Seeger, Pete’s father. The chapter just grew from there.

Readers expecting a standard biography, which this book is not, may anticipate learning about how Copland had some direct and profound influence on Dylan’s early work. They will be disappointed, and the book’s introduction tries to ward off such expectations.

In the Copland chapter, I’m interested in making other kinds of connections, not just between Dylan’s work and an individual or several individuals, but between his work and a larger cultural congeries of the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties. The succeeding chapters take different approaches.

ALEX ROSS: The chapter that we’re running on newyorker.com deals with Dylan and Ginsberg, but starts with Copland. What’s the connection?

SEAN WILENTZ: It’s in the intriguing little cultural circuit that opens the chapter. Obviously, the Beats were nothing like the Popular Front writers. But the left-wing culture of the nineteen-thirties—which, in the nineteen-forties, flowed into more mainstream currents—had an impact on the Beats, a deep impact in Ginsberg’s case, but it’s there in Kerouac as well.

It’s not a major point in the book. Still, what the book poses as two distinct and in many ways contradictory major early influences on Dylan, the music of the Popular Front and the prose and poetry of the Beat Generation, had some connections between them as well. And, frankly, moving quickly from Copland to Dylan through the Beats also gave me a hook to make the transition from a chapter on Aaron Copland to one on Allen Ginsberg.

ALEX ROSS: How would you characterize the bond between Dylan and Ginsberg? What did they do for each other?

SEAN WILENTZ: Both men were in a state of artistic and spiritual flux when they met at the end of 1963. After that, Dylan moved into a creative period marked by his readings of Blake and Rimbaud, who were also Beat heroes, as well as his readings of Ginsberg and Kerouac. Ginsberg, after a slow patch, wrote some remarkable poems in 1965 and 1966 that reflected Dylan’s influence, about the cultural convulsions around the nation and rest of the world.

Ginsberg helped give Dylan credibility as a serious writer of lyric verse. He also helped loosen Dylan’s breath. Dylan helped bring Ginsberg fully into the nineteen-sixties. (For one thing, Ginsberg composed “Wichita Vortex Sutra” in 1966 on a portable tape recorder which Dylan had given him as a gift.)

By the nineteen-seventies, Dylan’s fame had eclipsed Ginsberg’s. And there were all sorts of personal tensions between them. Ginsberg, who had broad musical tastes, saw rock music as a way to become a truly democratic artist, but he would never be a rock star. Dylan was all of that and more. But the respect between them ran deep, and the personal bond lasted until the day Ginsberg died.

ALEX ROSS: Dylan’s politics are a site of never-ending contention. Has Dylan been more or less politically engaged at different stages of his career, or is his work always political on some level?

SEAN WILENTZ: Politics are inescapable for any writer of Bob Dylan’s human and humane scope. His work, I think, shows that around 1963, he abandoned any idea that conventional politics of any kind could really change the world. He’s said more than once that he puts no store in the political game. But he writes, bitingly, that “we live in a political world,” so it’s always there.

Then again, he can still perform “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” at the Obama White House to help honor the music of the civil-rights movement. It’s not as if he can’t see gallantry in political songs. (Me, I wish he could’ve played “Chimes of Freedom,” which is a much better song, more complicated, more capacious. But that’s just me being a fan.)

ALEX ROSS: Was it a challenge to find the right style to write about Dylan?

SEAN WILENTZ: C’mon, Alex, it’s a challenge to find the right style to write about anybody and anything. Writing about Dylan posed one problem right away: how to put in bits of my own experience without letting it become anything like a memoir. The hardest challenge was to try and write from different angles about various aspects of his work without losing coherence.

ALEX ROSS: You talk about a Dylan show at Wolf Trap, in 1997, which spurred your interest in Dylan’s recent work. As it happens, I saw him four nights earlier, in Philadelphia, and that show played a similar role for me. What about the sound of those shows caught your interest?

SEAN WILENTZ: Really?! I wish I’d been in Philly too.

I’d actually come back to Dylan a few years earlier, when my father was dying, and Dylan’s rendition of “Lone Pilgrim” on the fairly recently released acoustic album, “World Gone Wrong,” consoled me. But I went to that Wolf Trap concert wondering—hoping, even—that he might play “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” God knows why it was that one above all, but it was.

“Sweet Marie” was the first number he played, and I was hooked. Larry Campbell had also recently joined the band, and I quickly came to learn that any band sounds better if Larry Campbell is playing in it.

About halfway through, they played an acoustic “Cocaine Blues,” in a version so tight that Dylan released that night’s recording of it a decade later on his compilation “Tell-Tale Signs.” Later came “Blind Willie McTell,” and still later “Highway 61 Revisited.” So it was the set list, as well as the performances, that did it, a group of songs that I especially love. And even though Dylan had only just recovered from an illness that could have killed him, he was in strong voice.

When it was all over, a mysterious stranger—this is true!—slipped me a rough-mix cassette tape of a new Dylan album, then disappeared. It was “Time Out of Mind,” and I heard “Not Dark Yet” for the first time. I’ve still got the tape to prove it. Whoever that guy was, he’s not getting it back. An unforgettable night.

ALEX ROSS: You write that on his latest albums—“ ‘Love and Theft,’ ” “Modern Times,” “Together Through Life,” the Christmas album—Dylan has become a “modern minstrel.” What are the main elements of this minstrel voice?

SEAN WILENTZ: It’s less of a voice than a writing style. And the style is a variation of what Dylan has been doing his entire career, permuting and combining musical and literary traditions and making something new, something his own. Over the past ten years or so, the mixing has become much denser, richer, more sophisticated, the influences ranging from Vergil and Juvenal to Hambone Willie Newbern and Bing Crosby (the presiding shade over the Christmas album). And that’s what I mean by modern minstrelsy.

It’s Dylan’s highly literate involution of the traditional songster style, which juxtaposed the blues, folk music, commercial pop, gospel, and what we today call “old timey” country music. The songsters—who started out in the late nineteenth century and in time included Blind Willie McTell and Jimmie Rodgers—had their origins in blackface minstrelsy and in turn influenced vaudeville.

What I think of as Dylan’s modern minstrelsy started to emerge on “Time Out of Mind,” but exploded on “ ‘Love and Theft,’ ” whose title, alluding to blackface minstrelsy, pretty much sums it up. I wrote at the time it appeared that Dylan steals what he loves and loves what he steals. Not that the four albums you mention are close to identical. The Christmas album, in particular, is an album of cover versions, and is in many ways sui generis. But even then, as Dylan inhabits the holiday pop songs of his childhood in the nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties, there’s a good deal of self-conscious love and theft going on.

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